There are many, many stories that emerged from Jeremy Pruitt’s time.
Cooper Mays added to the Pruitt lore with his story from COVID he told Off The Hook Sports on Wednesday.
Mays enjoyed his time during the COVID-19 pandemic, spending time working out on his own and on the lake.
“I would work out every morning and then just hang out with my friends, be out at the pool, maybe go out on the lake, you know just hanging out,” Mays said. “That’s it, had a great time during COVID. I had no qualms with COVID personally.”
Anyone familiar with college football knows that spring practice is the real grind during the year. From winter conditioning, to practicing through the spring, to meetings, college football is a year-round sport.
To put it frankly, spring football is a grind.
Mays didn’t realize how serious COVID truly was, and how it could impact football season until the coaches, surprisingly, told the team to stay home during spring practice.
“So when they told us to stay-at-home and when we asked ‘when are we going to come back’, they (said) ‘we don’t know,’” Mays said. “We have no clue how long this will take. So that’s when I kind of realized (COVID could affect football).”
As Mays said, college coaches don’t let the players off the hook for anything. Meetings continued virtually during COVID, something Pruitt struggled to understand.
“We met virtually,” Mays said. “It was not great. It was hilarious… Look at our staff, ours was real country and just some old school coaches. They were not invested heavily in technology, so they were not doing well with it.”
So, Pruitt and his staff struggled to even work Zoom. Once they got the Zoom working, it didn’t seem they were very successful either.
“We were joining Zoom meetings and people would be on boats,” Mays said. “Nobody knew what was really going on and there was no way for anybody to be held accountable to anything. So it was not productive at all. I mean, nobody knew how to use them.”
Could Zoom meetings, or lack thereof, be to blame for the 3-7 season Pruitt and the Vols had in 2020? Maybe, but Pruitt’s lack of knowledge on Zoom may have been the least of Tennessee’s worries.
After sitting through Zoom meetings, Mays is adamant he has never had a productive Zoom meeting.
I’m going to be honest, I don’t think I’ve had a productive meeting on Zoom from 2020 to 2023,” Mays said. “Zoom meetings, just my mind, I can’t lock in enough man. I wrote a paper about this when I was doing my early enrollment stuff. The average seconds of attention span from like 1990 until now has dropped from 11 seconds to seven seconds.”
